Making sense of data

Just as practically every startup these days claims to be a cloud company or an IoT company, they’re all big data and analytics firms, too. Well, not really, but they at least toss the hot terms into their company descriptions. We’ve tried to pull out the real big data and analytics companies to highlight them here, listed alphabetically. Most focus on helping companies make sense of their oodles of data, sometimes for customer service, sometimes for IT purposes and sometimes for security reasons. And not all of them are brand new firms.

(Note: We’re only including businesses that have announced funding in the past six months or so, but excluding any already mentioned in our two most recent roundups of big data and analytics companies to watch here and here.)

Alteryx

Funding/investors: $163M in venture funding, with a big $85M round in October, 2015 led by Iconiq Capital and Insight Venture Partners.

Focus: Self-service software and cloud service for business analysts that enables them to blend data, analyze it and share it so that actions can be taken. The company says it has more than 1,000 customers around the world, including restaurant Sonic, which we wrote about here. Alteryx has its roots in a company called SRC that worked closely with the U.S. Census Bureau and was formed in 1997 by its three founders, all of whom still hold prominent roles at Alteryx.

BigPanda

Funding/investors: Announced $16M in Series B financing led by Battery Ventures in October, adding to $7M in Series A funding from 2014.

Focus: You hear a lot about big data and analytics tools for lines of business analysts, etc., but what about the poor IT and DevOps staff? They’re getting swamped with data too. That’s where BigPanda comes in, offering a data science algorithm-based platform that it says can help companies make use of data to keep IT services running smoothly as well as look back at historical trends. The company claims customers such as Caesars Entertainment and The Gap.

Cogito

Funding/investors: About $9M overall, including $5.5M in Series A funding, led by Romulus Capital and including Salesforce Ventures, in November, 2015.

Focus: Cogito Dialog, which is a cloud- or on-premises-based app, uses behavioral analytics technology – including analysis of the human voice -- to help phone support personnel improve their communications with customers and to help organizations better manage agent performance. Key customers include Aetna, DARPA and Partners Healthcare. Originally a spin-out from MIT Media Lab, Cogito has a big-time MIT pedigree, with CEO and co-founder Josh Feast earning an MBA from MIT and working closely with fellow co-founder Sandy Pentland to convert Pentland’s proven scientific theory on “honest signals” into commercially deployed behavioral analytical technology.

DataVisor

Funding/investors: Scored $14.5M in Series A funding in October, 2015 in a round led by GSR and New Enterprise Associates.

Focus: Uses big data analytics to enable predictive threat management for consumer-facing websites (such as Yelp) and mobile apps. The company says its security analytics engine works within a Spark big data platform and can handle “billions of users and trillions of accounts.” Not everyday you have a company claiming trillions of anything... DataVisor CEO Yinglian Xie and CTO Fang Yu previously worked together for seven years at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, where the women contributed to securing Microsoft’s Web offerings.

Datos IO

Funding/investors: In September, added $15.25M in Series A funding, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and True Ventures, to $2.75M in earlier seed funding.

Focus: While many of these startups are focused on speeding access to or improving visibility into big data, Datos IO concentrates on making sure you don’t lose information stored in scale-out databases like Cassandra and MongoDB. It takes some serious smarts to run a company with a focus on such distributed versioning technology, and Datos IO has those, with a team – including the CEO and CTO -- boasting numerous years of experience at IBM Research.

Fuzzy Logix

Funding/investors: $5.5M in Series A funding from New Science Ventures in November, 2015.

Focus: In-database analytics software -- DB Lytix is the flagship offering -- and related professional services designed to help organizations process data without separate data extraction processes, middle-tier analytics servers or additional storage systems. Not exactly a startup given that it has been around since 2007 when formed by a couple of ex-Bank of America investment bankers, Fuzzy Logix claims to have built up a big-name customer base that includes Raymond James and three of the top five U.S. healthcare organizations. We decided to leave them on this list despite the company listing (ick) a Chief Vision Officer and a Chief Culture Officer on its management team.

Import.io

Funding/investors: $13M in Series A funding, announced in January 2016, led by Imperial Innovations. Adds to $4M-plus in earlier seed funding.

Focus: Lets organizations extract data from their websites and convert it into APIs that can be used to visualize/analyze information and power applications. In announcing its funding, Import.io said that in 2015 its users “created more than one million web APIs and extracted data from over 5.5 billion web pages.” Seems as though the company’s free and paid tools are catching on with customers, as well as with partners, including the likes of Tableau, Interworks and Silk.

Panoply

Focus: Next-generation data warehouse platform designed to support “low-touch” users who need access to all sorts of data for analyzing via tools like Excel and Tableau. CEO and Co-Founder Yaniv Leven blogged in December that the company’s goal is to “Connect any data source to any insight tool with a click of a button.” The company’s technology is built atop Amazon Redshift, Elasticsearch and Hadoop. Moran Halevi, head of marketing, notes the company’s open source emphasis: “We do not consider data sources and visualization to be a core part of our technology. As such we develop tons of connectors for both ends and will allow, from March, developers to source their own connectors.” The team behind Panoply seems to know how to have fun: Its co-founders specialized in data management and analytics at mobile gaming companies previously, and Panoply really plays up its geekiness on its website and social media channels (i.e., lots of Star Wars, LEGOs, etc. references). Open beta launches on March 1.

Pendo

Funding/investors: Raised $11M in Series A funding led by Battery Ventures in October 2015, adding to about $1M in seed funding from 2014.

Focus: Cloud-based software that helps companies gauge customer satisfaction and needs by tracking their interactions with websites and apps. Pendo’s technology can also help product vendors upsell customers by informing them of additional features and offerings, and can foster better communications, such as letting customers know exactly when downtime for a fix might take place. The company’s management team, include a CTO who was Red Hat’s first engineer, has extensive experience managing products.

Periscope Data

Funding/investors: $9.5M in Series A funding in October 2015, led by DFJ.

Focus: Software platform for data scientists that allows them to run fast analyses on SQL databases (“Type SQL, get charts”). The company’s offering is supported by Amazon Web Services data warehousing technology, and Periscope Data got its start when ex-Microsoft and Google employees joined forces. Among Periscope’s 200-plus customers: American Red Cross and Tough Mudder.

PHEMI

Funding/investors: Up to about $15M in funding now as the result of a $12.2M round in October that was led by CTI Life Sciences Fund and British Columbia Discovery Fund (Discovery Capital).

Focus: Hadoop-based big data warehouse with a heavy emphasis on privacy and data governance. PHEMI initially focused on serving healthcare companies, which isn’t a surprise when you learn that the entrepreneurial team behind it joined forces with a couple of cardiologists from the start. PHEMI’s latest funding will enable it to expand into the public sector, financial and insurance markets.

Saama

Funding/investors: $35M in funding from Carrick Capital in June, 2015.

Focus: This 18-year-old consulting and services company uses its Fluid Analytics Engine to help clients across vertical markets put analytics to work in their business processes. Saama even hosts a big data event in San Francisco in February called Intuition that features big shot data and analytics execs from companies like Cisco, Microsoft and Wells Fargo. Showing that it’s not like all the other companies, Saama actually collected its first institutional capital last summer as it expands its business geographically, such as in Pune, India and Columbus, Ohio.

SnapLogic

Funding/investors: $37.5M in Series E funding in December from Microsoft and Silver Lake Waterman brings the company’s total venture funding not far south of $100 million.

Focus: SnapLogic introduced its enterprise integration platform as a service in 2013, enabling organizations to better hook up their apps and big data across hybrid clouds. The company, which last fall added new support for Spark, Cassandra and Microsoft Cortana Analytics, boasts more than 400 customers, including Adobe, Box and GameStop.

StreamSets

Funding/investors: $12.5M in Series A funding in September led by Battery Ventures and New Enterprise Associates.

Focus: Open source based software designed to continuously collect/ingest structured and unstructured data from numerous sources to make it available for analyzing via various big data platforms. StreamSets’ Data Collector was built from the ground up for enterprise scale. The company’s founders, hailing from Informatica and Cloudera, are well versed in this market.

WebAction

Funding/investors: Announced $20M in Series B funding led by Intel Capital in September. Overall, the company (which has changed its name from WebAction to Striim) has raised $32M.

Focus: Enabling organizations to make use of data as soon as it is created. Via its Striim (pronounced “stream,” but plugging the i’s in there for integration and intelligence) software platform, the company claims to be able to integrate data from multiple sources such as databases, log files, applications and IoT sensors in real time so that big data can be exploited. The core team comes from real-time data integration/replication company GoldenGate Software, which Oracle bought in 2009.